Past 20 years have witnessed the shift of focus in language teaching from teacher-oriented to learner-centered approach. Although there have been several research studies on cooperative learning, they were limited to the defining of its constructs and pedagogical values, and the surveying of teachers’ beliefs and their practices at school. This paper looks into the experiences that a teacher had in the attempt to change her teaching practice with cooperative learning techniques applied in an EFL reading class. It was also an effort to improve from her previous teaching method which had been grammar-translation mixed with a task-based approach. The process of a teacher’s implementation of a newly adopted class approach including decision-making, operating, interpreting/reflecting is shared through the first-person action research. Various data sources were presented to assess the legitimacy of accepting cooperative learning via group work as a valuable, viable instructional method in the real language classroom. A detailed description of a teacher’s experiences in the self-transforming process is provided along with guidelines to make classrooms successful cooperative language learning places.

Face-to-face interview format has been widely used to elicit English language samples in oral proficiency testing. It is desirable to replicate target language use situations in oral testing, and the direct testing format is believed to assess more authentic and interactive language abilities. However, it has been argued that speech samples from unstructured face-to-face interviews are quite different from those in natural communication settings. The purpose of this study was to understand the construct to be assessed through an unstructured face-to-face interview, which was adopted to an English speaking contest. Data from the English speaking contest were analyzed in terms of how they were different from the characteristics of naturally occurring conversations. It was found that the test construct in the English speaking contest did not reflect the features of natural conversation specifically in the areas of turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and topic nomination due to asymmetrical power relations between interviewer and interviewees. Therefore, it was suggested that we need to incorporate diverse discourse-based approaches into current speaking skill assessments, which can interpret spoken language data in many ways.

This paper outlines some concerns that must be addressed in writing primary school English curriculum and materials in the Korean context and makes suggestions to better the quality of materials made for the next time around. Literature review of current primary school English materials has shown that setting realistic and appropriate program goals based on needs analysis, early introduction of written skills, adoption of graded reading and writing materials, and more informative teacher's guides are needed. Suggestions are made in terms of the organization of the curriculum, language materials, continuity, diversity of needs, class time modules, and teachers’ roles, as well as trainer and teacher training. These issues need to be tackled at the personal, local, and national levels in order to bring out a better outcome in primary school English education and to maintain continuity into the secondary school.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of two task-processing conditions (10 minutes of pre-task planning time and content familiarity of the task) on spoken performance in terms of the fluency, complexity, and accuracy in a narrative task. The subjects were 20 Korean undergraduate students with a high language proficiency. The results of the two-way interaction effect between the planning and familiarity of the MANOVA were significant in terms of pause length. The univariate test of familiarity in an unfamiliar condition for subordinate clauses in the MANOVA test was significant. The study also found a trade-off effect between complexity and accuracy in terms of the effects of planning time in planned and unfamiliar conditions. These results suggest that the performance of learners could be varied depending on the different combinations of task-processing conditions even in a single narrative task.

The purpose of this experimental study is threefold. First is to investigate how significantly EFL learner’s competence in the English pronoun as cohesive tie correlates with their reading proficiency. Second is to search for pedagogical implications for acquisition of the pronouns with reference to awareness-raising instruction. Third is to examine how narration variation affects EFL learners’ co-interpretative competence in the pronouns created in descriptive or direct speech narration. The subjects were grouped into two by pedagogical variable, i.e. awareness- raising instruction. Both control and experimental groups were given three tests: 1) house-made Toefl as pretest or norm test, and two post-tests: 2) Pronoun Test in which every pronoun was asked to be co-interpreted with its referents in the reading text; 3) Reading Proficiency Test constructed by a close technique. All the test scores were statistically processed in terms of t-test and the Pearson correlation. The statistics revealed a positively significant correlation (0.743 or 0.629) between EFL learners’ co-interpretive competence in the English pronoun and their reading proficiency. Furthermore, the impact of awareness- raising instruction turned out to be significant for co-interpretive competence and thus for reading proficiency. This experimental study concludes that higher competence in the pronoun corresponds to higher proficiency in reading. Thus acquisition of English pronouns must be facilitated at the discourse level by means of intra, inter, and intra-intersentential co-interpretation with their referents.

This study investigated patterns of communication breakdowns (CBs) and use of communication strategies (CSs) in the process of meaning negotiation between a native English speaking teacher and thirty five Korean EFL university students. For over a nine-week period, the classroom was observed and the data were collected through the transcriptions of tape recordings, teacher interviews, and student interviews. The results showed that patterns of CBs for EFL learners were multi-dimensional: syntactic, phonetic, lexical, and affective. Particularly in this class, whereas the teacher tried to choose the most effective and various strategies and tactics to ‘bridge the gap’ in communication, the student did not use CSs in a diverse manner in order to overcome CBs and only used eleven out of 33 CSs in the taxonomy of Dornyei and Scott (1997). Accordingly, it may be necessary for EFL learners to have more experiences in more contextualized classroom interaction or consciousness-raising activities for diverse use of CSs without sacrificing communicative opportunities to learn target language.

This study examined composing processes of six graduate ESL writers in timed essay situations. The participants’ composing behaviors were videotaped and they were asked to retrospect their composing processes after they completed their timed essays while watching the video of themselves composing. The stimulus recall data were transcribed and analyzed using coding schemes. The analyses of the participants’ composing processes show that they were not able to go through composing steps they normally do in drafted writing situations. Instead they were forced to go through a linear composing process and were not able to enjoy heuristic discovery. The findings of this study support the claim that timed essay is a special form of writing and that essay exams do not necessarily produce a representative sample of test takers' writing ability in target language use domains.